[Rob Hughes]

Hi all

Second season with bees, first season managing swarming. At my out-yard today, checked my strongest hive. Last week I removed frames 1, 9 and 10 from the bottom deep box and spaced the remaining frames out, adding in 3 blank frames to split up the brood area, in the name of swarm prevention. I am also trying to transition to medium boxes and this presented an issue, as now where to put these deep frames, as all other boxes are mediums? They looked to be mostly or all stores, so I put them on top in an otherwise empty deep box. I thought the bees may move those stores down or be ready to abandon them if at the next inspection I took them out and left them for a while, then I could take them back home and cut those frames down to mediums. But -today when I checked them the centre one had two very solid-looking queen cells, they looked almost complete, on the face of the comb - not the bottom. Very hard to find the queen among so many bees in this colony. So I am not sure if the colony is getting ready to swarm, despite my brood nest disrupting manoeuvres, or perhaps has lost its queen and maybe those are succession cells? The bees were just a tad touchy, which could indicate no queen, perhaps. Weather was good and the bees were hard at work. I left them alone, but figure I may need to immediately split them or do something else to manage a potentially imminent swarm. Opinions and suggestions? I would rather keep the colony together than split it if possible, but it may be too late. Thanks for any ideas,

Rob

 

[JStinson]

Did you look closely at the brood for eggs? That's an easy way to tell if your queen is there or not.

Those sound more like supersession cells than swarm cells. Bees build lots and lots of swarm cells, but only a few supersession cells.

I think if I were you I would open that box back up and look hard for eggs. That will tell you if you have a queen or not. Then you can make your decision based on that.

 

[Rob Hughes]

Thanks for that, I should have thought of it but didn't. I am making up what is turning out to be a complicated-looking plan of attack. Reading up on cut-down splits, if it turns out it's swarm prep rather than supersedure. My main concern is if I get right into all the sorting out of capped and uncapped brood frames and bees all over, but can't find the queen, then what? It has to be critical to know where she is and which of the split hives to go into. Anyone done this recently and have any tips?

The good news is that it's great flying weather and the meadow flowers are kicking in well.

Rob